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Turn off adwords, that's my advice, concentrate on the natural search results and if you're product based do to the legwork to get your product feeds into the Merchant center so you appear in Google shopping.

It all depends on industry and number of competitors, but generally a good user experience, strong natural search results and price are you main factors in success of an online shop.

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Lots of competitors sadly, we have tried shopping and it never really produced any orders to warrant the cost. For my industry (mainly corporate) adwords is best as it's not really a product you would look for on shopping (even though there are companies showing them in there).
It's a fairly new user friendly website so SEO is improving and we are the cheapest on some of the products. It's just not being found enough as the bigger companies just chuck more money at google who seem to be the real makers out of all of this.

Originally posted by Aria

On reflection though, as I am taking a bath, listening to "Rain of blessing-vajra chant" while typing on the iPad

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Depends on how you measure your success, please don't fall into the trap of analytics and go pure numbers - it's about your conversions. Ads generate page views and a small proportion of those make an order, so can your profit margin justify the cost per lead/sale? I've worked with a few that don't, each web sale when looked at it was COSTING them money that was being subsidised in part by the shop and regular customers! This you can live with if you get repeat custom, but again brand loyalty needs to be nurtured so people don't Google part numbers next time and come back to you direct.

ROI terms, targeted, properly targeted managed and followed up sale teams should eat a website for breakfast, even with salary and overhead costs. Put simply, if the web starts beating a dedicated sales employee - sack `em!

Happy to take 15minutes and have a look if you want, sometime next week as in 50% work mode due to half-term.

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Thanks DT. I have spoken to someone from the company that supply our e commerce platform and they pretty much said what you just wrote. We are going to give them a try and see what they can do. We have all the history there and he seemed to know what he was talking about. It's a monthly contract so i'm not tied to anyone for a year. It works out we are paying too much for a budget currently and not getting anything for it. They can make it perform better for less money which is what Google said yesterday when i spoke to them.

Originally posted by Aria

On reflection though, as I am taking a bath, listening to "Rain of blessing-vajra chant" while typing on the iPad

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I've experienced with the team at Google Adwords HQ. They are pretty good at that sort of thing being fair on them, they need you to succeed to keep spending/justifying the monies you spend. There are places through the process of web that you can really work on to get the costs of a transaction down, shipping methods and label printers, credit card processing fees, all savings that a nice e-commerce type can then pump straight back into the development budget.

Have you thought how long you'll give them to before a thorough review? I'd suggest the first 3 months can be very "learning", you learn new things, they learn business and products. With any luck during that learning you'll find some cost savings as well.

Good luck, I would say this, but if they sound good if they agree with me, clearly